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Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

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Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#271

Post by yannyu »

Alupis wrote: post #136
yannyu wrote: post #85

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or maybe we hold driverless cars up to an unfair standard. Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents. Many, many more are injured or disabled. Why would we expect driverless cars to reduce that to 0? Shouldn't it be good enough if they reduce it to 50%? 25%?

> Today, 3000 people die in the US every single day because of car accidents Whoa... that's over 1 million people annually... you probably mean globally? Depending on the year, it's somewhere between 30,000 - 40,000 annually[1][2][3], or in the worst-case, about 109 people daily in the US. When you examine those numbers further, you'll see about 10,000-18,000 (depending on the year) are sadly still alcohol related[4]…

Yes you're right, I misspoke, 3000 a day worldwide.

Agreed that we're doing pretty well as far as deaths and injuries worldwide, but there's a lot of room to improve.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#272

Post by bmurray7jhu »

AlanSE wrote: post #146
anticensor wrote: post #131

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Self-driving car: ZF Electric car: ZF TaaS: ZF Self-driving advertising services: ZF All will be available, all from the same company. EDIT: Waymo laughed at "route-based advertising" when I mentioned, but ZF supports this idea. Route-based advertising or route advertising is an advertising model where your vehicle diverts to make you see a particular place and/or get you to visit a particular shop. For example, it m…

Silly question, but what do you mean when you type "ZF"?

Zermelo–Fraenkel set theory?

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#273

Post by stale2002 »

enord wrote: post #249
stale2002 wrote: post #78

Earlier quoted context omitted.

You argument is basically that it is more important to figure out who to blame for deaths, than it is to get rid of those deaths in the first place. That strikes me as weird. Also, the people who will be paying out damages will be exactly the same as the people who are paying out for them today. The insurance companies. The simple solution to these "ethical" issues is for everyone to have insurance, and for the insur…

Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control, and car manufacturers can not possibly afford to insure all cars they sell in perpetuity. Insurance only works if the insuree bears the risk (and it has to be an actual risk with nonzero probability times cost, i'll leave why as an exercise to the reader) and in the case of car accidents, that risk is liability, which people have and computers don't.…

> Nobody will accept liability for actions outside of their control,

Sure they will. People pay for insurance now, and the insurance companies will give you a discounted price for your self driving car insurance.

Why wouldn't I want to accept liability in exchange for a cheaper policy? I would win as well as the insurance company.

The benefit is clear. And this is an exchange that many many people would be willing to make if it meant that their insurance prices were cut in half. It's free money to the consumers.

You are treating this as if this is some new problem. Your car can already have the wheel fall off, due to no fault of your own, and you'll crash, and the insurance company will pay for it.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#274

Post by markdown »

linuxftw wrote: post #209
Fricken wrote: post #202

Earlier quoted context omitted.

The infrastructure driverless vehicles rely on is their own internal maps, which have lanes and signage marked out. Being able to visually detect these things is important, but it is a measure for added redundancy. Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem. The biggest technical challenges are relate…

> Great strides have been made in using machine learning to filter out obscurants such as snow. Perception for autonomous vehicles is effectively a solved problem. Great strides is not 'perfected' and I don't think perception for autonomous vehicles is a solved problem whatsoever. What is a driverless car to do if it slides out of position on the road and is now facing the wrong direction? Does it have the ability to…

> Great strides is not 'perfected'

The goal isn't perfection. The goal is to be as good as humans.

Eg: An autonomous vehicle driving through snow backed by millions of miles of experience driving in snow is better than someone from the tropics driving through snow for the first time.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#275

Post by tomp »

teraflop wrote: post #235
tomp wrote: post #195

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> It was designed for binocular vision Does binocular vision even matter at such distances (i.e. beyond a few meters)? I thought it was only effective for relatively close objects.

Sure, as long as you have reasonably well-calibrated cameras and optics. Back-of-the-envelope calculation: assuming 1920x1080 camera sensors with a 90-degree horizontal field of view, each pixel covers a visual angle of approximately 0.001 radians. If you have two cameras separated by 5 feet horizontally, and your measurements are accurate to within a pixel, then you can measure the distance to an object 500 feet awa…

Ah, I meant for humans. As in, how much is depth-perception actually necessary for driving... Obviously, humans also use higher-level cues, which IMO are much more important.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#276

Post by andymal »

fipple wrote: post #245
linuxftw wrote: post #204

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I think interesting edge cases include: 'empty cardboard box or log?' 'Deer just crossed road, is there another one close behind?' 'Driving temporarily on the wrong side of the street due to construction or a downed tree limb' 'Police directing traffic' 'Driving on wrong side of road to avoid collision' 'One lane bridges' 'Busy parking garage with blind corners' 'City Bus driver forces themselves recklessly into your…

Things like snow aren’t necessarily a problem in the beginning because you can start by selling a self driving car that doesn’t work in the snow. There’s still a market for it.

People only have to do real driving in the worst conditions? That sounds like it wouldn't work out too well for them.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#277

Post by 100ideas »

photos_victim wrote: post #189
100ideas wrote: post #167

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Does anyone have back-of-the-napkin estimates of total passenger throughput for central public transportation vs ride share transportation for any metropolitan area? If public transit i.e. Muni serves 10x or 100x riders each day vs ride sharing than I see your point... I think. Wait. Maybe you could spell it out?

Don't bother with napkins. The data is open. TNC trips average about 150k / weekday [1], BART carries about 415k trips / weekday [2], and Muni carries about 750k [3]. Thus, public transportation carries about 8x more people, with the caveat that not all BART journeys start or end in SF. On the other hand, 99% of vehicle trips in SF are either private cars or TNCs. Neither of these was my point, though. My point was t…

Data! Awesome!

Huh. This is interesting. The "Learn More About TNCs" button on the page you linked to leads to some more facts, including:

> "On a typical weekday, TNCs make more than 170,000 vehicle trips within San Francisco, approximately 12 times the number of taxi trips, representing 15% of all intra-San Francisco vehicle trips." - https://www.sfcta.org/tncstoday

So: 1,333,333 intra-San Francisco vehicle trips each day, including Transportation Network Companies (TNCs), and from your other links, 1,165,000 MUNI+BART trips per day, for a total of 2,498,333 rides per day

The population of the city during business hours is ~1,100,000... Oh of course, most people make round trips so it makes sense for the total number of rides to be >2x the city population.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#278

Post by esalman »

erikpukinskis wrote: post #95
Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

Hasn’t Tesla autopilot saved more lives than it took? So it’s more net beneficial (so far) than cautious Waymo?

I was in a statistics class where the Professor was teaching likelihood, then asked if there are cases when we don't want to maximize the likelihood ratio. The answer is when you want to put a limitation on false positive (or negative) detection.

You wouldn't vet a system that is susceptible to high false negatives and likely to kill people- no matter how good the accuracy is.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#279

Post by esalman »

Animats wrote: post #71

Driverless cars are coming along just fine. Waymo is making steady progress. The sensors are getting better. The problem comes from all those "fake it til you make it" startups, Uber and Tesla being the worst. Both have killed people. This is mostly about sensors and geometry. Machine learning has a role, but only in target identification. That's how Waymo does it. The fake it til you make it crowd had the fantasy th…

My machine learning professor used to say that people tend to sensationalize self-driving car fatalities, without realizing that if every car on the road was self-driving, deaths would go close to zero.

I think the hard part of the problem is the infrastructure. Everyone wants to fix the cars, but they'll leave the hard part to the government- which is the development of autonomous-ready infrastructure.

Re: Driverless Hype Collides with Merciless Reality

#280

Post by umeshunni »

andymal wrote: post #276
fipple wrote: post #245

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Things like snow aren’t necessarily a problem in the beginning because you can start by selling a self driving car that doesn’t work in the snow. There’s still a market for it.

People only have to do real driving in the worst conditions? That sounds like it wouldn't work out too well for them.

No, there are entire countries that don't have snow.
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